


grey unknown

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Body Horror, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Force Ghost(s), Gore, Graphic Description of Corpses, Introspection, Masturbation, Necrophilia, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, One-Sided Attraction, Other, Vomiting, not dark!rey but needstherapy!rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:47:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22203586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ben Solo's spirit may be gone, but his body is still here.Rey cares for it, for as long as she can.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 11
Kudos: 30





	grey unknown

For someone who uses the Force from the dark side — supposedly ruled by his passion — Kylo Ren is surprisingly austere and chaste.

Rey would like to think she is too, and this activity is a perfectly healthy way to wind down from an arduous day of training. She decompresses on the rickety wooden bed, stretches her limbs out. She points her toes, flexes her foot. Reaches her fingers to the splintering headboard and really lets her shoulders pull to her ears, then relaxes.

Then, she slips a hand underneath the band of her trousers and underneath her drawers. She sighs contentedly and tilts her head back, as she leisurely plies her lips with the slide of her fingers.

Nowadays she’s been using it as an opportunity for meditation: Rather than letting her thoughts dart erratically between spontaneous fantasies of pulled hair and heated kisses (some familiar faces, most unfamiliar), she expels them.

She is here. Ahch-To’s sea gestates the winds which whistle past the darkened window. It reeks of it, sea salt and the sour aroma of kelp. The warmth and the humidity sweat her out, gathering heaviest on her flattened back and the now bending creases of the backs of her knees. It’s an especially warm night. Uncomfortable.

The curling pleasure Rey pulls out of herself makes it much more tolerable. She closes her eyes...

...and her brow furrows. The ambient temperature cools and the humidity abates. Her sweat chills, freezing. The change sterilizes the smell, now that of nothing at all. She doesn’t stop touching herself. These luxurious silk sheets that caress her arms and calves feel much better than itchy wool, anyway.

The hum of a ship. Someone breathes close to her ear, then hitches their breath.

Oh, no. _Now?_

When Rey opens her eyes, the metallic charcoal paneling of Kylo Ren’s bedchambers greet her. It’s all colorless and dimly lit, from the spartan furniture to the sheets she writhes in. Kylo lies next to her, suddenly looking grey himself.

She doesn’t know what she expected. Kylo gloating over catching her in such a vulnerable moment? Shaming her? Watching her? _Joining_ her? Not busy being scandalized and distressed, much more than she is.

He’s refusing to turn his head and acknowledge her, to even open his eyes, but she can tell he’s well aware of what’s happening. She’s caught him in a somber, meditative moment, all clad in his heavy black garments, with her own form of meditation.

His stress is _delightful_.

It tickles her to see him so deeply troubled by this, as if he didn’t routinely barge into her consciousness over the last few weeks. Anxiety thrums throughout his body. His eyelids screw shut and his manicured nails squeeze into his palms.

 _Of course_ she’ll stop and apologize if he says no, she reassures herself. It’s fine. Kylo’s lips press firmly together and stay that way.

Her tongue throbs as though she’s bitten it, which is impossible. Her jaw hangs unhinged, and she permits those whimpers of pleasure to escape her throat.

She’s closer still with Kylo around, however unreceptive he may be.

Rey gasps and keens. She curls her toes and jerks her knees as her orgasm approaches her. Her fingers frantically rub at her clit and rustle the bedsheets with the erratic movement of her arm.

Kylo utters a strangled noise, then shoots his arm out to grab a pillow and smother his face and ears with it.

* * *

Rey cradles Kylo’s (no, _Ben’s)_ weight in her arms and presses her ear close to his lips. She cranes to listen his rattle: A sigh so gentle, so soft that she amplifies it with a twist of Force just to catch it. His final breath is a dusting of warmth against her cheek, and then it’s nothing at all. The Force ripples as what’s left in his body departs, the tiny wave of a pebble dropped in a pond from an inch above.

She’ll never forget it. This frozen moment of a quiet, solemn death. Forever beautiful, both him and it.

Ben’s body dissolves into nothingness, every inch of him becoming indistinguishable from the blanket of Force in this forsaken place. She’s left only holding a memory, empty cloth bundled in her fingers.

Neither Kylo Ren nor Ben Solo are here anymore.

The delirium and exhaustion gather the front of her skull and at her temples. Her focus wavers. The dark dungeon around her distorts at the periphery of her vision, the stone bending in ways architecturally impossible.

Rey breathes, then exhales. She is awake and aware, and purges herself of these self-imposed illusions.

The cloak she cradles swells, and the same weight presses back into her knelt thighs.

No. Well, yes: Neither Kylo Ren nor Ben Solo are here anymore. However, Ben’s _body_ is still here.

Rey witnessed many sides to Ben in his final months. Seething fury and uncontrolled rage manifested in the crackles of lightning, murdered stormtroopers and shredded consoles. Sopping self-pity, inconsolable sadness. Humiliation at his failures, and fear of slipping further in the eyes of the First Order. Glee at Rey’s own slips, then disappointment at her inevitable pull back towards the light. Finally, revelation. An unerring resolve to do what’s right.

This is the first time Rey sees Ben at peace.

The muscles of his face have loosened. No twisted sneer, nor gloomy pout. No furrowed brow, nor squinting eyes. Only a glassy gaze with a unhinged jaw, frozen to allow her to admire the irregular smattering of moles across his waxy skin. His full lips invite her yet again with their natural part.

She ducks her head and presses a kiss to them. Jakku’s unceasing light has bleached Rey’s lips, and she bites them from stress. Ben’s are plush, soft, smooth and pliable. It’s strange; it hasn’t been more than a few minutes, and yet they already are lukewarm.

She pulls away, left with a bitter taste in her mouth.

Missed opportunities. What could have been. Now, she’s left with only a shell.

Rey vows to keep it as a souvenir.

* * *

As exhausted as she is, it’s not difficult to pull Ben’s heavy corpse (wide-boned and muscled, nearly twice her weight) to the star fighter with a tug of Force.

Getting away from Exogol is easy. It’s figuring out what to do afterward that’s the hard part. There’s no shame in keeping the body. At the same time, it’s not as if she can flaunt it.

She _wants_ to enjoy the celebrations on Ajan Kloss to the fullest, she really does. It takes so much out of her to bend the light around Ben in front of so many people, and she suffers so much anxiety about some mechanic checking out the craft before she can hide him somewhere safer.

Rey buries her face in the crook of Finn’s neck as Poe’s arms squeeze around her, but Ben’s remains divide her attention entirely.

Later, long after she rids herself of them, she regrets not cherishing _this_ moment.

* * *

Rey isn’t delusional. She’s well aware that this isn’t _him,_ it’s an _it,_ an empty vessel approaching inevitable decomposition. She’ll watch it, in time. That’s why she’s on Tatooine, after all: To say goodbye to the last of the Skywalkers.

He _was_ beautiful.

It _is_ beautiful.

The lack of life doesn’t disgust her. On the contrary: It enables her to do as she pleases.

She venerates Ben Solo’s corpse. She freezes it in this moment of non-decay, binding the Force throughout the mass into stasis, however temporary.

It’s exhausting. It’s worth it, if only to keep him for as long as possible.

She touches him in ways she knows she never could, were he still alive.

* * *

His thighs are pale, flecked with fascinating little trails of moles and dusted with dark hair. They’ve seen so little light. They’re soft, too, the muscles there unable to flex. She admires how her fingers dimple them when she pokes them, even if she doesn’t allow them to bruise.

Rey tip-toes her fingers higher and higher, and admires the how the hair thickens to a trimmed and neat patch around his genitals. She tugs playfully at his balls, then admires the heft of his soft and limp cock in her hand when she strokes it.

His asshole is so soft and inviting when she dips her hand underneath him and probes between his cheeks. Getting a single finger in is too difficult; the body is so dry and so tight. But she _does_ want to explore.

She’s got some speeder grease around here, somewhere...

* * *

She sleeps next to it ( _him, it, him, it_ ) now.

Those eyes of his are huge and sunken, herself never bothering with dragging the eyelids down. They’re going first, despite her best efforts. There’s a stripe of deep blackish-reddish-brown forming across his the whites of his eyes. It almost looks like his dark irises deform and lose their circularity to wisp out into his sclerae.

At the moment the effect is visually interesting, pleasing in its strangeness. She doubts she’ll feel this way in a week when the effect envelopes his entire eye.

For now, she can still pretend.

She takes that cold and limp hand and slides it under her clothes, just to imagine what would happen if he just... _gave in_.

* * *

Rey can’t kiss Ben anymore.

The soft wetness of his mouth is no longer the tantalizing kind. It’s repulsive, constantly sloughing transparent slips of tissue and losing its integrity. On its journey to become a fetid, pulpy hole.

She locks her mouth over his, then pulls back to spit out pus.

* * *

Rey twists his beautiful, luscious locks around her fingers and tugs them so tight they threaten to tear at his scalp.

Her thighs tighten as hard as she can around his head, and she desperately grinds herself against his lax and useless face: his long nose, the sloppy lips and gums softening around hard white teeth, his hairless cheeks.

She moans and grunts, grateful that he need not breathe anymore.

* * *

It takes so much of her willpower to keep every piece of him together. There are so many little knots of connective tissue, his sinews and the soft flesh inside of him she cannot rebuild every single day. So, she does what she can: The bones require little, so she maintains his overall shape. His beauty — what she can see — _that’s_ the valuable part of him.

She’s well aware that she must let him go. She’s just not ready yet.

Rey allows Ben’s body to rot, but only on the inside.

* * *

What a foolish idea that was.

The bloat settles into him only two days after she permits it, puffing up his tissues and distorting his otherwise pristine and uncolored visage. He’s increasingly shapeless, as if someone has stuffed bags of water underneath his first layer of muscle and his dermis.

Black blood and bile gather at the corners of Ben’s lips. She places her hand on his engorged stomach and then presses her weight on it.

She’s only curious.

A jet of the ichor shoots out of his slack mouth so suddenly she only just darts out of its path. It drips, thin with grainy irregularities, down that pallid chest. Its dark rivulets contrast _so_ well with his delicate features; his pink nipples flank its path.

(Since when has she switched to breathing through her mouth?)

Still, gas and putrefaction hideously swell his gut. She _has_ to excise it.

With a shaking hand, she draws the hilt of her lightsaber from her hip.

A moment of hesitation stills her. Just as quick as it arrives, it passes.

Rey presses the pommel to Ben’s navel and impales him with a flick of the activation lever.

The shack illuminates with the golden glow of her blade, as are his features from underneath. He looks ghostly; the light bouncing off of the shriveled, blackened balls that used to be his eyes.

His insides sizzle upon immediate contact with the hot plasma, wet flesh bubbling around the entry wound. If she closes her eyes — and doesn’t smell — it sounds like when someone fries slices of happabore belly.

She thinks she’s fine with this until the moment after she pulls the lever off with a drag of her thumb.

With the now-gaping and clear-edged hole directly through his gut available, his insides vacate. The half-fermented, sticky materials of decomposed sludge spew from his back. The torrent bubbles as it puddles onto the wooden floors and soaks them, aerated from the bacterial gasses.

Then, the smell (sulfuric, rotten, sickly sweet) hits her.

Rey yanks her head away and stumbles a few uncoordinated steps away, clutching at her nose and mouth with her free hand. Then her stomach upends. Through her fingers, she vomits everything she’s eaten that day in a single, unstopping heave at the other side of the hut.

* * *

Survival on Tatooine is not trivial. She doesn’t spend her days grooming Ben’s body, far from it. Only _some_ nights.

In the meantime, she’s taken up small jobs from the people from the neighbouring villages to get sustenance in the form of bantha jerky and milk, and the ever-scarce water.

Rey has little to complain about. Scavenging for scraps on Jakku was less rewarding in its payout than this.

Today, she’s assisting a group of shepherds. The herd is fifteen strong, headed in the direction of the nearest (likely dried) riverbed. It’s easy. The big beasts are dumb and placid, and all she has to do is monotonously stick to her flank and walk alongside them.

Her thoughts drift between soothing visions of snow-covered worlds — the ideal right now — and the blackened, flaying skin awaiting her at home.

Luke’s throat clears behind her.

It doesn’t startle her, per se, but it is unexpected.

She turns on her heel, and there he is: A vision true as the last day she’s seen him, marked by a halo of twisting and evaporating blue. _Grumpy,_ with those crossed arms.

Luke levitates and glides at her pace, two inches above the sand as Rey continues to walk backwards. That’s a skill she’d like; not willing to die for it, though.

“I was wondering when you’d visit,” she says and smiles at the ghost.

The spirit’s expression doesn’t lighten up. Actually, his eyes squint further in greater disapproval.

Her stomach drops. He _knows._

“What?” Rey asks, apprehensive of the topic.

“ _What?”_ Luke shoots back, forever a contrarian.

She plays it cool, and tilts her head. Earnest fondness (nostalgia) seeps through her words, syrupy. “I’m really very flattered that you’ve decided to stop by.”

“I bet.” He leans his upper body towards her and spits out, “Now that you’re officially a huge fan of dead people.”

Her eyes close but for a second. She sighs, partly exasperated and partly relieved that she’s not the one forced to bring it up.“I _knew_ that’s why you manifested yourself to me.”

“It’s the big stinking nephew-shaped bantha in the room. No, not you,” he adds, to the unobservant animal plodding alongside him.

Rey bites her lip and turns back on her feet to walk forward. She doesn’t want to look him in the eyes when she utters the petty excuse of, “This is how I’ve decided to mourn Ben.” She can’t even add the ‘is that so wrong?’ on the tip of her tongue, because she _knows_ it is.

“Congratulations,” Luke says dryly. “You’ve chosen the most abhorrent, awful way to do it. Out of all of the ways!” She imagines that he’s waving his hands around to punctuate it. “The First Order would line up to give you a medal. Y’know, if you didn’t do the right thing by destroying them.”

The image insults her. She curls her fists and vehemently shakes her head. “It isn’t _dark_ to witness death. There’s nothing _dark_ about natural processes.”

“ _Witnessing_ death?” Underneath that bitterness, there’s a familiar layer of amusement in his voice. “Is that what you’d call... whatever this is?!”

“What would you call it?” Rey asks, genuinely curious.

“At my _most_ generous? Unreasonably selfish. But I think ‘perverse abomination’ is more accurate,” Luke says, matter-of-factly.

“ _Perverse?_ Excuse me, I —”

“It’s amazing to me you’re still talking to me like this. Rey, I _know_ what you’re doing. Don’t you feel any shame?”

She does, deep down. She chooses not to recognize it.

It’s not in her voice at all when she probes, “Are you saying what I’m doing is unforgivable?”

“No, I’m not saying that.” But he doesn’t sound certain. “Keeping it up? That might be.”

She considers it. Coming back to Ben this evening, and tomorrow, and the next day, and six months down the line when it’s not even him at all.

“I’ll think about it,” she quietly tells him.

She continues to walk. After a period of silence, she allows herself to turn her head over her shoulder to peer at the empty desert behind her.

Gone already.

* * *

Rey takes heed. As much as she desires to see this through to the end, to watch that flesh desiccate into a mummified husk, and then a sun-bleached skeleton: She shouldn’t.

No. She _can’t._ She can’t do this to herself. Luke is right, even in death: She’ll languish in this obsession forever if she lets it happen. If not Ben, then the next one and the one after that.

This has cost her so much time. She doesn’t even remember when she landed on this planet anymore.

She drags herself internally kicking and screaming, stubbornly insisting on staying the path, as she physically (well, a little psychically) drags the snail-like corpse through sands which it stains black, red and green in its wake.

To the resting place, at least approximately. Luke and Leia’s lightsabers are buried deep in this nondescript patch of sand, and she can only triangulate them by the undeniable swell of Force above where she left them.

Only but a few weeks ago would Rey have kissed the body goodbye. Now, she doesn’t want to look at it — doesn’t want to acknowledge it more than the idol, the _fetish,_ that it is.

The sands depart with a pull of her hand and swallow the carcass whole with a clench.

Rey turns and looks back at the expanse she just came from.

 _There._ In the distance.

A mirage. Heat rising from the sands and distorting the air above it.

No, a spirit. Amorphous in one moment, patterns of the ripple of heat and Force forming familiar facial features.

His robes are an unfilled shape, as if her brain struggles to conceptualize them. In her eyes — no, mind — they flap and unfurl in the gusts.

Ben’s spirit watches her, the hurt and lack of comprehension sketched clear in his wavering and translucent face.

She’s spent the last few months vehemently denying herself the ability to feel shame and guilt. Now they tie her stomach in knots, claw up her esophagus and settle there.

It’s as if her repressed feelings return only to choke her.

“I,” she tries to start. She doesn’t know what to say. She can’t say it.

“Rey?” he asks. The winds carry Ben’s soft voice, or at least the _idea_ of it. It wavers and trembles.

Rey covers her face with her hands. She crumples to her knees, and bends her head down to the scorched Tatooine earth.


End file.
